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Increasing rates of school enrolment have changed childhoods in the global South, so that it is now the norm for children to attend at least some years of primary school. This paper explores the extent to which valuing of children as educational projects and outcomes may be displacing previous valuations of children as contributors to the domestic economy. The paper draws on qualitative interview data from Young Lives, a longitudinal study of children growing up in four developing countries, using a case study approach to explore the experiences of four children in rural Andhra Pradesh, India. The paper suggests that children are balancing expectations for the future with responsibilities to their families in the present, and concludes that the over-valuing of formal qualifications and the under-valuing of forms of work such as agriculture risk being internalised by children, leaving those who do not succeed feeling they are 'a waste'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study finds a differential impact of different types of natural disasters on education and cognitive ability of children aged 12 to 15 years in Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam using a Young Lives data set and child fixed‐effects regression. Floods tend to cause more harmful effects on children's education than droughts, frosts, and hailstorms. Exposure to floods reduces the number of completed grades of children in Ethiopia, India, and Vietnam. For the case of Vietnam, exposure to floods also decreases school enrollment, and cognitive ability scores of children. Although floods do not have a significant effect on children in India, droughts, frosts, and hailstorms have a significantly negative effect on cognitive ability test scores of children. In Peru, the effect of disasters on children's education is small and not statistically significant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]